May 11, 2016

Sweet Suspense: an interview with Martha Conway, author of "Sugarland"

A New
Mystery by Edgar-Nominated Author Martha Conway

In
1921, young jazz pianist Eve Riser witnesses the accidental killing
of a bootlegger. To cover up the crime, she agrees to deliver money
and a letter to a man named Rudy Hardy in Chicago. But when Eve gets
to Chicago she discovers that her stepsister Chickie, a popular
nightclub singer, is pregnant by a man she won’t name. That night
Rudy Hardy is killed before Eve’s eyes in a brutal drive-by
shooting, and Chickie disappears.

Eve
needs to find Chickie, but she can’t do it alone. Lena Hardy,
Rudy’s sister, wants to learn the truth behind her brother’s
murder, but she needs Eve’s connections. Together they navigate the
back alleys and speakeasies of 1920s Chicago, encountering petty
thugs, charismatic bandleaders, and a mysterious nightclub owner
called the Walnut who seems to be the key to it all. As they fight
racial barriers trying to discover the truth, Eve and Lena unravel a
twisted tale of secret shipments and gangster rivalry.

SUGARLAND
mixes the excitement of a new kind of music—jazz—with the darker
side of Prohibition in a gripping story with “real suspense for
anyone who likes a good mystery.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Martha:
I was
listening to an early piece of jazz—“Si Tu Vois Ma Mere” played
by the great Sidney Bechet, and I realized I was imagining a story in
the back of my mind. A woman was going down a cold, winter road
looking for something or someone. That’s all I knew.

Gef:
How
long have you been toiling away at your craft, and how have you found
your progression as a writer thus far?

Martha:
I’ve
been writing since I was about five years old, only back then it was
with crayon on wallpaper. Since then I’ve graduated to paper and
computer. My first novel, unpublished thank goodness, was what you
might call a “starter novel” — this is where I began learning
the nuts and bolts of creating characters and building plots. Every
novel is a learning experience.

My
first published book, 12 Bliss Street, was a mystery, which I think
is absolutely the best genre for a new writer to cut her teeth on,
since writing a mystery really teaches you how to build up a plot,
and prepare (and exploit) reader expectations. In mysteries, every
plot point is a development of something that has happened
previously. There’s no wandering (even if it seems, at times, like
there’s no clear direction). That’s good practice for any kind of
writer.

As
I move into historical fiction I find that, whether my novels include
crime-solving or not, I want the plot to move fast and have a lot of
twists. But every twist has to have its own logic within the story.
You have to make a case for it. Sometimes I think that writing is a
lot like being a lawyer.

Gef:
Who
do you count among your writing influences?

Martha:
Dickens,
definitely, for his sense of fun and his amazing characters. Also
Laurie King, Caleb Carr, and Walter Mosely.

Gef:
What's
the worst piece of writing advice you ever received? Or what piece of
writing advice do you wish would just go away?

Martha:
I
studied with a teacher who used to say, “Never go into a
character’s head or heart.” This lends distance to the story, in
my opinion, and makes it much harder for readers to care about or
engage with the character.

I
also dislike this advice to new writers: “If you can do anything
else, do it.” Sure, writing is hard and can be frustrating and you
may not succeed with your project. But I think if you want to write
(even if you can do something else—William Carlos Williams sold
insurance) you should try! Why not? We’re not all of us going to be
Toni Morrison, that’s true, but being creative is an activity that
is rewarding in and of itself. At least, I think so.

Gef:
What
kind of guilty pleasures do you have when it comes to books or movies
or whatnot?

Martha:
I
love Patrick O’Brian, all his sea-faring tales. Reading read him
and Jane Austen is like eating comfort food.

Gef:
What
projects are you cooking up that folks can expect in the near future,
and how can folks keep up with your shenanigans?

Martha:
My
next book will be coming out in 2017; it’s called THE FLOATING
THEATRE, and takes place on the Ohio River in Antebellum America. A
socially awkward costume designer gets caught up in the Underground
Railroad— that’s all I’ll say. 

Martha Conway is the author of Sugarland:
A Jazz Age Mystery [Noontime
Books], available via Amazon
as of May 12, 2016. Conway’s first novel was nominated for an Edgar
Award, and her second novel, Thieving
Forest, won the 2014 North
American Book Award for Best Historical Fiction. Her short fiction
has been published in The Iowa
Review, The
Carolina Quarterly Review, The
Quarterly, The
Massachusetts Review, Folio,
and other journals. She teaches creative writing for Stanford
University’s Continuing Studies Program and UC Berkeley Extension,
and is a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship for
Creative Writing. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she is one of seven
sisters. She currently lives in San Francisco.

3 comments:

I did enjoy this novel, but at times could not follow who was a part of what gang. The one thing that was quite striking in telling of the murders and crime was the absence of the police. The police were paid off to look the other way. It is interesting that our society now is seen to be crime-ridden, with gangs, guns, and drugs being prevalent, when almost one hundred years ago, we had the same problems.